Ten Years On Project Signature Event: Media Framing of Political Events in Lebanon (Video)

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Jun 30, 2021 Lebanon

Ten Years On Project Signature Event: Media Framing of Political Events in Lebanon (Video)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Ten Years On Project Presents

Media Framing of Political Events in Lebanon

From Uprising to Blast & Aftermath


This is the sixth signature event of the
Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World Project

For more information, go to thearabuprisings.com

Organized by the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at GMU, Arab Studies Institute, and the Asfari Institute at AUB

Featuring
Hatem El-Hibri
Ayman Mhanna
Dima Issa
George Eid
Maria Bou Zeid (Moderator)
Adel Iskandar (Discussant)




Today, Lebanon features one of the most severe economic crises in its history. Combined with the coronavirus pandemic and deepening political gridlock, the residents of the country are experiencing acute economic dislocation, political alienation, and daily hazards to their lives and wellbeing. The October 17 Revolution and August 4 Beirut Port explosion simultaneously—albeit different—reflected and added to the underlying features producing such crises. In a signature event of the Ten Years On Project, this panel explores how the Lebanese media are dealing with this turmoil, shedding light on the framing of events based on political agendas.

Featuring


Hatim El-Hibri is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research and teaching interests focus on global and transnational media, visual culture, Lebanon and the Middle East, critical theory, and the historical entanglement of media technology and institutions with the production and contestation of urban space. His first book, titled Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure, is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2021). In Fall 2019, he was Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School at University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining George Mason, he taught at the American University of Beirut. 

Ayman Mhanna is the Executive Director of the Beirut-based Samir Kassir Foundation, the leading freedom of expression and media development NGO in the Levant region. He joined SKF in September 2011. In this capacity, Ayman oversees the Foundation’s monitoring of violations targeting media and culture professionals, advocacy for more liberal legislation, research into the future of the media sector, and training activities to build the capacity of emerging, independent media initiatives. From January 2016 to February 2017, he was also the Executive Director of the Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD), a network of 200+ media development and journalism assistance organizations. He previously served as Senior Program Officer for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (2007-2011) working on election observation, electoral reform and civil society involvement in public policymaking. Ayman holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Saint Joseph University in Beirut and a master’s degree in International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris. He is a member of Friends of Europe’s European Young Leaders program – MENA chapter (class of 2017) and a member of the international Contact Group on Content and Jurisdiction at the Internet Jurisdiction Policy Network for 2019-2022, and a visiting professor at the College of Europe, Natolin - Warsaw, teaching a course entitled “New challenges for media freedom."

Dima Issa is a Senior Lecturer of Mass Media and Communication at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. She holds a PhD from the University of Westminster in London, an MSc from the London School of Economics in Global Media and Communications and an MA from the University of Southern California in Global Communications. Her research has primarily focused on Arab diaspora and media consumption, looking at ways in which identity is constructed and reconstructed through space and time. In addition, her interests include gender and representation, popular culture and audience studies, new media and technologies and social networking. Before academia, Dima worked in the corporate sector in media relations, publications and website management as well as in broadcast journalism.

George Eid is a Senior Broadcast Journalist and Executive News Producer. He is an international Multilingual (Arabic, English, French, German, Greek) correspondent, anchor and member of the intl. investigative reporters and editors organization. He holds a master’s degree in marketing media and management from Sorbonne IV in 2014. He was the head of News Operations at MTV Lebanon until November 2020 after having served as deputy editor in chief for 6 years. He was equally a senior correspondent for the channel. Eid is also a university lecturer at Notre Dame University, Saint Joseph University and ALAC leadership academy. His documentary “Kalimera Men Beirut” produced in 2016 has won several European awards. Furthermore, he is a coach and trainer/consultant in communication/media/personal branding and journalism with over 15 years of experience. George Eid is currently based in Dubai and works as a Senior Broadcast Journalist/ Executive News Producer at Al-Arabiya News Channel-Dubai.

Maria Bou Zeid (Moderator) is an Associate Professor and the Chairperson of the Media Studies Department at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU). She is also the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) - Beirut Office. Dr. Bou Zeid holds a Doctorate in Media Studies from Université Paris II, Assas, Paris, France and a D.E.S. in Journalism from the Lebanese University in collaboration with the French Press Institute-IFP and the Center for the Formation and Perfecting of Journalists-CFPJ, Paris, France. Her research interests include: Media Ethics and Media Education. She is also engaged in research on higher education in the Arab world tackling issues such as the efforts of Internationalization in the field of Higher Education in the MENA region along with the challenges that the Lebanese Education sector is currently facing. Bou Zeid has also an extensive professional experience in the field of television production and broadcast journalism.

Adel Iskandar (Discussant) is an Assistant Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of several works including Egypt In Flux: Essays on an Unfinished Revolution (AUCP/OUP), Al-Jazeera: The Story of the Network that is Rattling Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism (Basic Books), Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press), and Mediating the Arab Uprisings (Tadween Publishing). Iskandar`s work deals with media, identity and politics and has lectured extensively on these topics at universities worldwide. His forthcoming publication is the coedited volume Media Evolution on the Eve of the Arab Spring (Palgrave Macmillan). Iskandar taught for several years at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He is a co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Ten Years On
Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World


This event is part of the Ten Years on Project, a year-long series of events, reflections, and conversations created to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. We launched this project in order to interrogate and reflect on the uprisings, with the hope of producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.

Watch all of our previous Ten Years on events here:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Co-Sponsors: Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), University of Chicago (Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory), Stanford University (Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Stanford University), AUC Affiliates, Georgetown University (Qatar) Center For International And Regional Studies (CIRS), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), Institute of Palestine Studies.

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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412